Facebook Expanding Its Organ Donor Initiative to Asia

Facebook’s organ donor initiative looks set to come to its first market in Asia, that’s according to Korean news agency Yonhap which reports that the feature will go live for users of the social network in South Korea.

The report states that the state-run Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will team up with the social network to give the feature a visible push when it is brought to the country.

As it is a company with truly international reach, Facebook is unlikely to expand the service piecemeal and bring it to Korea alone so we suspect that the country will be one of a number — perhaps from Asia and beyond — that gets the feature for the first time tomorrow. At this stage, however, no details of any such plan have been communicated by the Menlo Park-based company.

Launched in May, the ‘life saving’ initiative, as Facebook called it, has been a huge hit and it has helped swell the ranks of organ donors worldwide. Donor registration numbers jumped by 800 percent in California the day after it launched, while the UK’s NHS saw its own figure more than triple overnight.

Organ donation is currently available to Facebook users in Australia, Brazil, Columbia, Denmark, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, UK and the U.S. Read more ……